Diary of an IT intern

This summer, we were joined at the farm by Maddie – our first IT intern, from Bristol University. In her last week, she wrote about her experiences with us…

Almost as soon as I left home for university I became a Riverford customer. I was delighted by their ethical stance and their product. Eva Wiseman, a columnist at the Guardian, said receiving her veg box made her ‘feel a bit loved’ and I felt the same about my weekly veg delivery. So naturally, I was thrilled to spend the summer working as a software developer at Riverford.

After two years of a Computer Science degree I felt comfortable programming; however, while at Riverford I was regularly presented with challenges I’d never faced. In contrast to the paltry applications I’d tinkered with at university, I needed to read through pages of code, belonging to past iterations of the website, to fix a bug or add a new feature. Coping with the complexity of large code bases is a common hurdle for amateur software engineers and one I’d anticipated. However, the technological innovation at Riverford surpassed my expectations. I had a crash course in Clojure, a powerful functional programming language with alien syntax, and React.js, a fashionable Javascript library written by Facebook.

The projects I worked on were just as novel. One of which was automatically generating recommendations for the website. This involved strategically weighting statistics for popularity, seasonality and similarity to produce sensible product recommendations. I hope this feature offers a source of inspiration to customers whilst alleviating the burden for those tasked with curating these recommendations manually.

I am very grateful for my time at Riverford. I had the opportunity to work alongside exceptionally skilled developers who are passionate about their craft. What’s more, I leave this week with the same admiration for Riverford’s business ethic that I arrived with. It has been a pleasure to work with highly motivated people to further the prospects of a business with a proven commitment to the planet and its people.